I built a Gentoo machine "once". It was a lot more time to install as I am sure you are aware. When I got finished I had a Linux machine not much different than any other Linux machine. No opinion one way or the other. You shouldn't have any trouble though. One thing Gentoo is good at is documentation.

rebooted, I selected the gentoo default kernel and US keymap, now I am waiting as it tries to boot...last time I allowed it to do that automagically, let's see if this works, if not, I may have to move from the Gentoo 2007 full (live) DVD to the alternate install.

I am doing this on an old box...(Intel Celeron 466Mhz, 256Mb RAM, 40 Gb Hd). According to thier web page, it meets min specs...hmm

Oh, its back to finalizing udev...and everything has stopped again...

Aha! Not for the live CD, I have to use the minimal install for this machine! BRB

Hey! Look at that, it worked! I'm on the splash screen now...time to read more directions and prepare!

got it sorted, I had to do my make.conf based on a model someone in the gentoo forums posted for me. I'm syn'ing now. I'll let you know how far I get this time!

I will admit one thing, besides being annoying, it does make you feel pretty powerful to type a few lines of commands and then have an hours worth of info scrolling across the screen. OK, maybe more annoying than cool, but it's something anyway.

The experiment is to see if it makes this old clunker any noticeably faster. I don't expect it will, but it's an adventure into something new if nothing else.

My idea was see if it offerred any advantage being installed on an older system. But, as I don't have the time to dedicate to the install, it's drug out for a while now. As I said before, fortunately, it's not a computer I have to have running.